Dark Screams, Volume 8 Read online

  It seemed closer than it should have been.

  He could have sworn he’d left it farther up the street, up there by the oak tree on the left.

  He realized he was perspiring.

  Foolish, he thought. You’re being foolish.

  He chuckled and wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow. Of course he hadn’t left it by the oak tree. He’d left it closer, by the mailbox.

  He turned and kept walking, whistling softly, tension easing off. His imagination had the best of him, that’s all. Silly. He chuckled again, and as he did the hairs on the nape of his neck came to life and started crawling.

  Something was scraping surreptitiously along the sidewalk behind him.

  A half-forgotten snatch of Coleridge suddenly sprang screaming back to life in his mind to taunt him: Like one who on a lonely road, doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned ’round walks on, and turns no more his head; because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.

  He came to a dead stop and turned slowly around, heart trip-hammering in his chest. The typewriter was no longer by the mailbox. It was much closer, less than thirty feet away, motionless and innocent on the sidewalk.

  It was following him.

  He didn’t scream, though the effort went jarringly against every impulse in his nervous system. Instead, he considered the fact that the IBM seemed unwilling to move while he was looking at it, apparently preferring to locomote only when unobserved.

  He riveted his gaze on the typewriter and proceeded to back all the way home. No way would he take his eyes off the son of a bitch.

  When he finally located the door of his bungalow—a bit of a challenge, as it involved groping around blindly behind his back—the Selectric was still in his line of sight, an indistinct speck sitting in the spill of a streetlamp a block or so away. He fished his key out of his pocket and spent frustrating minutes trying to fit it into the lock using the Braille method. It was a waste of time; the lock was old and stubborn, a challenge to open under the best of circumstances. He needed his eyes for the task.

  A sudden adrenaline rush made him giddy. He grinned, almost relishing the challenge. Let the damn thing try to travel a full block in less than two seconds. Howard doubted it could be done, demon or no demon.

  He whirled and coaxed the key into the lock, thrusting it home with a satisfying click. His speed was amazing, truly Olympian, but not good enough. When he looked back up the street the black speck was gone.

  He glanced down. The typewriter was at his feet.

  This time he did scream, very loudly, and threw himself into his apartment, banging the door off the entryway wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He slammed the door in the typewriter’s face, bolted it, chained it, and wedged a chair under the knob.

  He slumped against the wall and slid, exhausted, to the floor. He wanted to stop shaking but couldn’t. He needed a drink, that’s what he needed. Very badly, oh, yes.

  He went to the kitchen, jittering all the way, jittering so hard he was afraid the fillings in his molars might dance out of his mouth like Mexican jumping beans, and got his one and only bottle of J&B from the pantry. He was ordinarily not much of a drinker, but that would surely end right here and now.

  There was a soft scratching at the front door. The typewriter was out there, clawing like some starving mongrel dog begging to be let in.

  Gee, Ma, he followed me home. Can I keep him, Ma, can I? Can I pleeeeeze keep him?

  He dragged the J&B into a dark corner, sat on the floor, and listened to the scratching at the door. “All I really want is a nice word processor,” he said and moaned, then proceeded to try to drink himself to death.

  —

  Howard discovered when he awoke the next day that he had somehow managed to crawl into the cabinet under the kitchen sink. His head was cradled in the crook of the S-pipe. After painfully extricating himself, he brewed a pot of coffee strong enough to melt plastic and took a handful of Anacin. He hoped it would ease the throbbing in his head, but it was less than sanguine. He’d probably spend the rest of the day having the little people inside his skull trying to excavate a space between his ears.

  It dawned on him in a slow, fuzzy sort of way that if he didn’t take a piss soon he was going to die. He lurched from the kitchen and headed for the Porcelain Promised Land, which was through the bedroom and to the left.

  He entered the bedroom and froze in mid-step, all thoughts of his bladder suddenly gone.

  The typewriter was on his desk, waiting.

  He had no idea how it got there. Maybe it came through the bedroom window (which he always kept ajar; burglars be damned, he had nothing worth stealing); maybe it knocked on the landlady’s door and asked for a pass key; maybe it turned to mist and drifted through the keyhole like Count Dracula; maybe it slid down the chimney like Santa Claus. However it got in, it was here, not belching fire and brimstone, but sitting on the desk as typewriters do.

  He approached slowly, ready to bolt if it made a move. He tried to pry it from his desktop, but it wouldn’t budge, as if nailed down. The typewriter was apparently determined to stay, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing Howard could do about it.

  He sat in his battered swivel chair, lit a smoke, and regarded the Selectric.

  Now what?

  Morty Ginsburg at the Hollywood StarGazer was expecting him to deliver yet another tawdry, sordid piece by tomorrow. Howard didn’t particularly enjoy writing what could be described only as the lowest sort of smut for a publication that featured starving, coked-out Hollywood starlets on the cover with black bars covering their genitalia (no such modesty inside the magazine, of course), but Ginsburg’s paltry fee did help meet the rent. Barely.

  He crushed out the cigarette, grabbed a sheet of typing paper (the cheap stuff; he couldn’t afford the nice twenty-pound bond), and rolled it into the machine.

  So far, so good. The IBM still hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary.

  He began to type, picking up the story where he’d left off yesterday: The old man with the lollipops stapled to the inside of his coat sat on the park bench, eyeing the pubescent blonde as she roller-skated by.

  Howard glanced up at the line he had written and felt cold fingers brush across his heart. He had punched all the right keys, but the machine had written something else altogether: Until the moment the man regained consciousness, he appeared to be just another twisted piece of muddy debris in a desolate, blasted landscape.

  “What the hell is this?” he muttered.

  Then the Selectric started writing all by itself. It wrote: The first line of your novel.

  Howard screamed and thrust himself away from the desk, riding his chair back against the wall and cracking his head painfully against the knob of the linen cabinet door. This did little to improve the status of his hangover. He clutched his head and hissed painfully through his teeth.

  The typewriter clattered again. As soon as Howard’s vision cleared, he squinted at the words on the page. The machine had written: Relax, jerk-off, you’re gonna hurt yourself. What’s your problem?

  “I’m not writing a novel!” shrieked Howard.

  Sure you are.

  “But I have a deadline to meet! Morty Ginsburg—”

  Forget it, the machine cut in. You shouldn’t be writing trash.

  “I need the money!”

  Ginsburg is a swine. His upper lip always sweats. He makes a fortune appealing to the sick, disgusting fantasies of perverted old men. You don’t need him.

  “I don’t?”

  How many times you wanna hear this?

  “What am I gonna tell him?”

  Call him up and tell him you’re sick. Better yet, tell him he’s sick. Tell him anything you want, just get him off your back.

  Howard craned forward, peering tentatively into the carriage housing. He saw nothing but mechanical parts. “Look, whoever you are—”

  Lucius, the machine wrote, clipping the tip of Howard’s n
ose with the font.

  “All right, fine. Lucius. Look, I can’t throw away my only meal ticket on your say so!”

  Some meal ticket. You’ve been eating Hamburger Helper for a year.

  “I happen to like Hamburger Helper.”

  Without the hamburger? Look, you’ve got to trust me!

  “Trust you! You scared the shit out of me last night!”

  Putz! You scared yourself; I had nothing to do with it. I was just trying to get home and get to work, with little or no help from you, I might add. Speaking of which, how about a fresh piece of paper so I can get to it? Got any nice twenty-pound bond instead of this cheap shit?

  Howard shook his head, far from convinced. “I don’t know about this.”

  You don’t have much choice. I sure as hell ain’t gonna write that piece for Morty Ginsburg. I’m committed for three novels. I don’t do filler for the beat-your-meat trade, capisce?

  “But won’t this mean I’ll be damned or something?”

  Is that what’s bothering you? You think you’ll be damned because a demon does your writing?

  “Won’t I be?”

  No more than you’d be Chinese if a guy named Wing Lee did your laundry. God, you’re quaint.

  Howard considered this. He had to admit it made sense. Besides, Cyril Pratt had said the fee was ten percent of Howard’s earnings, not ten percent plus his immortal soul (he’d love to see that negotiation acted out in some agent’s office).

  C’mon, c’mon, clattered the Selectric. Gimme a fresh sheet of paper, and while I’m doing this first page go take your leak and grab a cup of joe. You look like death on a cracker.

  Howard shrugged. “Why not? And no, I don’t have any twenty-pound bond, so you’ll have to make do.” He yanked the old sheet from the typewriter and rolled in a fresh one. The machine began writing the novel again, and—unlike the lightning speed with which it typed when conversing—it maintained a slow, dreadfully stilted pace.

  Great, thought Howard. The Two-Fingered Typist from Hell.

  He followed the Selectric’s advice and went to the bathroom, then got himself a cup of coffee. When he came back, the typewriter was still at it. He sat down, fished a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and leaned back to wait.

  The IBM finally spat the finished page into the air. Howard read it. It was good. No, it was better than that, it was brilliant and exciting. It grabbed you in the first paragraph and left you dying to read more. He peered over at the typewriter.

  “This is my novel?”

  The machine depressed its index button and the roller clattered impatiently, demanding more paper.

  “Oh, sorry,” mumbled Howard, and rolled a fresh sheet in.

  Whose novel do you think it is?

  “Is the rest of it going to be this good?”

  Better.

  “Better?”

  I figure a cool mil minimum for paperback rights alone. Good chance for a movie sale, too. It’s very visual.

  Howard smiled at the machine.

  Oddly enough, it seemed to smile back.

  —

  The first thing Howard did was call Morty Ginsburg and inform him that he would no longer be supplying product for his fine publication. You’ll never work in this town again, you asshole, you fuck! was among the kinder of Morty’s rejoinders upon hearing this news.

  The second thing he did was visit an acquaintance he’d met in a writers’ workshop. The fellow was a part-time carpenter and full-time unemployed actor, but what he really wanted to do was direct. Howard promised the guy a twenty-dollar bill sometime in the very near future in exchange for which the carpenter/actor/director built Howard a simple wooden roller mounted on a sturdy platform. The device, designed to hold a roll of white butcher paper, would go on Howard’s desk and feed the paper through his typewriter. Lucius bitched and moaned about not getting the twenty-pound bond, but Howard held out until he won that argument.

  The third and least pleasant thing he did was call his older brother, a senior partner in a successful law firm in Seattle. Howard had sworn he’d never ask his brother for anything, but he desperately needed some money to keep him afloat until the first novel was finished. After a lot of whining, pleading, and groveling on Howard’s part (and a lot of lectures, reproval-and recrimination on his asshole brother’s), Howard managed to swing a five-hundred dollar loan. The money was nothing to his brother—he’d been known to spend that much on dinner in one of those trendy nouvelle-cuisine restaurants he favored—but he still insisted on making Howard eat shit by the spoonful for every dime of it (Yes, Roy, I know I’m wasting my life…Yes, Roy, I know I’m living a worthless existence…Yes, Roy, I know you’re glad Mom and Dad aren’t alive to see what’s become of me…Yes, Roy, yes, Roy, FUCKING YES ROY!).

  As he hung up the phone, he swore he’d fly to Seattle as soon as the first royalty check came and stuff every single one of those five hundred dollars down his brother’s throat.

  —

  Things became very strange at the Hollywood Riviera Apartments after that. As Naomi Fassbinder would much later tell Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes: “Just before Howard’s first book came out—you know, it had the werewolf face with swastika eyeballs on the cover?—he became impossible to reach! He just locked himself in his bungalow and wouldn’t answer his door for anybody, not even the day his rent fell two months behind and I pounded on his door for an hour and threatened to call the police down on him! He was a weird one, all right. I never knew exactly what he was up to in there!” Then she’d cock her eyebrows and smirk at the camera as if to say No telling what kind of depraved things the man was into, at least I’ll never tell, but she didn’t really know. What Howard was into was far weirder than she possibly could have guessed, stranger still than anything she’d ever come across in her supermarket tabloids.

  The only times Naomi ever did catch sight of the elusive Howard Walpuski following the demonic possession of his typewriter, he was usually sneaking in or out, trying very hard not to be seen. He took an awful lot of white butcher paper up to his place, she knew this for a fact because she spent a great deal of time lurking at her window and peering through the curtains. At first she thought he’d killed somebody in his bungalow and wanted to sneak the body parts out one at a time, wrapped in paper. But since he only took paper in and never brought any out, she discounted this theory. Still, just to make sure, she always went through his trash to make sure there were no fingers or feet mixed in with the coffee grounds, grapefruit peels, and cigarette butts.

  One day while walking Toby, her Pomeranian (the one Howard referred to as “that frigging hairy Pomegranate,” but never to his landlady’s face), she spotted Walpuski skulking up the walk with a grocery bag. She chased him to his door, screaming about the rent all the way. He stuttered and stalled, fishing around for his key while Toby sniffed at his leg, looking for a good place to pee (or preparing to hump his leg; with Toby you never knew). Howard finally escaped into his bungalow, but not before she was able to see what was in the bag.

  “Meat!” she would exclaim to Mike Wallace much later. “Meat! Meat! Meat! Beautiful, expensive cuts, maybe two hundred dollars’ worth! Can you imagine? Buying all that meat with your rent two months behind? What could he have possibly done with it all?” Then she’d smirk at the camera again, as if to say, Certainly not what normal people do with fresh meat.

  The question of Walpuski’s meat became one of the lesser sidebars to the mystery overall. It was, in fact, the key to the whole thing, but, of course, nobody would ever know.

  —

  Howard was into the second day of writing his first novel (or rather having his typewriter write it for him) when he first found out about the meat. He was in the kitchen, frying up some hamburger patties for dinner while the Selectric chattered away in the bedroom. The thirteen-inch black-and-white TV in the living room was playing Paths of Glory on the KTLA Early-Evening Movie, and Howard was so engrossed listening to the dialogue that several minu
tes went by before he realized that the typewriter had stopped typing.

  Frowning, he took the pan off the flame and headed cautiously into the bedroom. The typewriter sat mute on the desk. Not a move, not a peep. Howard cleared his throat self-consciously.

  “Taking a break?”

  I’m hungry, wrote the typewriter.

  “You’re what?”

  Did I stutter? What part didn’t you understand?

  “Sorry. It’s just that I had no idea I was supposed to, uh, you know, feed you.” Howard cracked all his knuckles at once, a nervous habit he fell into when at a loss. “So what do I do, send out for Pizza Man? What do typewriters eat?”

  Schmuck. You keep thinking of me as a typewriter. Forget that. I’m a demon, can you dig it?

  “Look, this is all new to me! Help me out, gimme a hint! Stouffer’s doesn’t make a Frozen Entrée for the Damned!”

  Meat! Demons eat meat! And this particular demon’s pretty hungry! I can’t work if I don’t eat!

  “Makes sense. I could never write on an empty stomach.”

  You could never write, period.

  “C’mon, I’m trying to be nice about this whole thing and all you can do is take cheap shots!”

  Sorry, I get cranky. Low blood sugar.

  “Okay, so we’ll take care of it. Sit tight.”

  Howard went to the kitchen and returned with one of his hamburger patties skewered on a fork. He held it uncertainly over the typewriter.

  You want I should jump up and get it? What am I, a beagle?

  “I don’t know where to put it.”

  Another straight line.

  “Cut me a break, huh?”

  Just drop it in the carriage housing.

  Howard did, and the patty disappeared with an unholy sucking sound. The front and back of the typewriter actually moved together and apart in a monstrous parody of chewing, then the machine paused. It shuddered and spat the patty straight up in the air with such force that it stuck to the ceiling. Mortified, Howard stared up at the chewed, clinging meat.